It all started when I began poking around the garden bed where we were going to plant our maderin hedge at the back.

Previously it held a cupresus (living) and stump (dead). Now it was nicely graded stump grindings. But just below the surface it was solid wood from garden edge to boundary!

That stump took a good day to get out, and feeling the flush of success, we decided to remove the remains of the Liquidambar that were troubling us in the front yard. Actually, it wasn't just the Liquidambar's roots that were a problem: some days each time we tried the spade in the front yard we'd hit wood! (If you're interested in Liquidambars here is some US information and here's what Don Burke has to say)

So, attack it we did! But it wasn't long before we realised that this was not going to be as easy as the stump in the back. After the first weekend it looked like we'd just scratched the surface and my mind kept drifting toward bulldozers  !

But we continued the following week, and the hole just kept getting bigger and deeper. We eventualy got down to the decaying sandstone layer just above the bedrock!

These photos show some of the progress. You can plainly see the tangle of roots, which seemed to be self-grafting: which meant that even the smaller roots were not easy to pull out! The other thing that made it difficult was the location of the services: gas was a couple of metres north, sewer went right under the tree, water went straight through the stump and the old stormwater absorption trench had been filled with it's roots (even exploading the terracotta pipes).

We finished the job on the third weekend: utterly exhausted. But looking out the kitchen window made us laugh (slightly histerically)... it was so hard to believe that we'd dug that huge mass out of the ground! And at least we knew there was a couple of square metres where there weren't any roots.